Do you HAVE to use to identical hard drives for RAID 0

[NFS4]

I'm looking to add a second hard drive to my Western Digital Epxert 27.3GB drive for increased performance in RAID 0. Do I HAVE to use the exact same drive? If not, will I take a performance hit for not using the same drive or will I still get increased performance?

 

[Noriaki]

as far as I know you can use two different drives. It's not recommended though. If you do both drives take on the parameters of worse drive.

I've also heard stories of data corruption, not sure about that though.

 

[Viper GTS]

No, but the slower/smaller drive will be the limiting factor.

Viper GTS

 

[NFS4]

Ouch!! Guess I'll have to find another Expert 27

 

[glp1del]

I believe that identical drives are not requited. However, if the drives are of different sizes you will be limited to the size of the smaller drive. So if you have one that is 10 gigs and one that is 27 gigs you will be limited to only 10 gigs. Also I would think the speed would also be limited by the slower drive. I am also new to raid so this could be wrong but as I said it is my understanding of how raid works.

Hope this helps,
Glp1

 

[Pariah]

You do not need identical drives for IDE RAID. RAID'ing a faster drive to a slower drive is a bad idea as the faster drive will take all the characteristics of the worse drive. With access time being the biggest factor in HD performance, why slow a 12ms drive to 15ms just to get a few extra MB/s? Sounds like a dumb idea.

 

[Muerto]

I think you should still get increased performance. Assuming that both drives are capable of transmitting at the same speed (eg ATA66) then there shouldn't be a problem. For maximum storage space make sure that the drives are the same size.

 

[NFS4]

Anyone got a used Expert 27 they wanna sell?

 

[Gatsby]

Like many people have said and I'll reiterate..
Matched HDs are not needed but the slower one will dominate.

Thankfully I got 2 22GXP 18 Giggers a while back.

36 Gigs of Raid Fun

Gatsby - 748